Meet our team | Natalia Outerelo, EC4RURAL Project Manager: “Empathy and assertiveness in communication are essential in my daily work”

With this interview to Natalia Outerelo, we inaugurate a new section to present all the people who make up the EC4RURAL work team of our project.

What is your role in the EC4RURAL project, Natalia?
My role is to be the EC4RURAL Project Manager. This means that my daily work involves a variety of tasks, which are mainly divided into three blocks:

• Project management:
  • Follow-up of all work packages.
  • Follow-up meetings for all tasks.
  • Internal assessment of the level of achievement of intermediate milestones and specific commitments.
  • Existing schedule of tasks to be completed.
  • Pre-programming of tasks to be carried out within the project schedule.
  • Participation in the generation of content for energy citizenship training.
• Administrative, legal and financial support:
  • Administrative and technical management of the project.
  • Preparation of justification documents for the European Commission.
  • Management of the monthly and annual planning of the project.
• Communication and information with the European Commission:
  • Internal communication.
  • Preparation and coordination of project deliverables and recording of milestones.
  • Preparation and coordination of project deliverables and recording of milestones.

In general, what are the challenges you face in a project like this and how do you deal with them?
The main obstacles are managing the complexity of the responsibility and the intense moments of work both in the internal and external control of the project. On the other hand, regarding the difficulties between the pilots in Spain and Estonia, the management of different agendas, different schedules and different ways of working.

As the technical manager of the project, you are the link between the ten partners and the almost 30 people who make up the EC4RURAL team. They are all very different from each other, and there is also the barrier of distance and language. How is the challenge going?
It is a challenge when we are people from different countries, entities, personal and cultural backgrounds, expressing ourselves in a vehicle language, English, but not in our mother tongue. As these difficulties are obvious and all of us in the EC4RURAL team are aware of them, empathy and assertiveness in communication are essential characteristics of our daily work.

On the other hand, what is the most satisfying aspect of your work?
Without a doubt, the feeling of working as a team and facing the work, the results and the milestones for a common asset and to see how we are developing.

From your point of view, why do you think projects like EC4RURAL are important for society?
They are indispensable as they allow to explore, improve and implement or solve problems of various kinds with a co-creation and bottom-up approach and with a multi-stakeholder perspective thanks to European funding. In the case of EC4RURAL, I consider it particularly relevant in helping to promote local commitment to the clean energy transition through rural energy communities in Spain and Estonia, improving the conditions of the countryside and its people, and trying to propose innovative and replicable solutions in other areas of Europe.